orca — CLI Agent Orchestrator

Featured Project

orca — CLI Agent Orchestrator

Active

A single-file Python CLI I built to fan work out to parallel headless AI worker agents — Claude Code plans and delegates, cheap models do the writing. Open source, pipx-installable.

Active Featured Python · Claude Code · pipx

Project Snapshot

Status Active
Project Type Featured Case Study
Core Stack 4 technologies
Access 1 external link

Overview

Project Snapshot

orca is a single-file, dependency-free Python CLI that dispatches parallel headless AI worker agents and collects their results as durable on-disk artifacts (prompt, log, clean output, session id, status). I run Claude Code (Opus) as the orchestrator: the expensive model plans and hands out small instructions, and cheap open-source models running in workers do the actual writing.

It's how I do large jobs on a tiny budget — for example, modularizing ~14k lines of code that a single Claude session can't hold. Full write-up on the blog: My AI Coding Setup.

Key Features

Overview

01

Design

  • Pluggable adapters for many worker CLIs (cmd, Cursor, Claude, Codex, Kimi, OpenCode) — contributors can add their own in a few lines.
  • Event-driven via background shells: no polling, resume/fork support, telemetry per task.
  • pipx-installable as an `orca` command; no runtime dependencies.

Tech Stack

Core Stack

Core Stack

  • Python
  • Claude Code

Application Layer

  • pipx
  • CLI